Month: September 2006

Kickback is a stylish piece about a corrupt cop on a corrupt police force in a corrupt city. It’s by David Lloyd, the co-creator of V for Vendetta. According to an interview on Newsarama, the story sat in his drawer for seven years before being sold to a publisher in France (and eventually brought to Dark Horse this year).

It needed a few more years in the drawer.

Do you know how much it pains me to not like a story by Lloyd? V for Vendetta has long been one of my favorite graphic novels. Lloyd’s done a lot of great work over the years; his covers on the Marvel series Madrox were some of the best any publisher put out that year. Lloyd uses cinematic chiaroscuro to build his noir scenes (or at least that’s what Wikipedia says; after all, my degree’s in math, not art). That style works perfectly with stories of conflicted men in impossible situations, struggling against the darkness in themselves and in society.

The problem in Kickback is that we don’t really have those sort of characters in this story. We’re supposed to, after all; Joe Canelli is supposed to be a cop on the take suddenly faced with a gruesome crime spree that’s the by-product of the corruption in the city. But we never see the dark side of Canelli here. He’s always stone-jawed, doing what’s right, fighting to find out the truth behind the murders. He’s also supposed to be torn apart by some repressed memories of his parents’ death, but we really don’t get that struggle from him. In short, we’ve got a dull lead, and no amount of chiaroscuro and moody color can overcome that weight.

The art’s nice enough, but there’s a sinister threat lurking on the page: the lettering. Ooh, it made my eyes hurt. Remember how I said that this story was originally published in France? It’s obvious that the English lettering was slapped on here, and it really disrupts the reader’s ability to dwell in Lloyd’s murkish drawings. Take a look at these two cell phone drawings:

The top drawing shows a cell phone drawing with hand lettering. The information is conveyed to the reader unobtrusively. The text looks like it fits in the world Lloyd draws. The bottom drawing uses a digital font that looks awkward and breaks the reader from the comic’s setting. And this example is in proper perspective; there’s a few times where the letters don’t fit the perspective of the object it labels. The dialog font is not the easiest to read; the whole thing smells of a poor lettering job.

It’s not fun to give bad reviews to a fantastic artist like David Lloyd. I’m still looking forward to his next work.

Reviewing Kickback
Is hard to do, but I don’t
Have a vendetta.

Buy this book at Amazon.

Linkage here.

There’s another article on Comics Research & Such providing some nice ancillary comments.

When I was in 7th grade, I used this comic in an in-class demonstration about comics. It was the first moment I realized just how good Joe Sinnott was as Kirby’s inker. I still think of Sinnott’s iconic, sleek look whenever I think about the FF. And this splash page has always haunted me:

For all of the technoimagery and collage work and Negative Zone images in this comic, this is truly the standout image of the book. Ben Grimm, alone, abandoned, awash in self-pity, standing in the rain. Stronger than nearly every other person on the planet, yet helpless against the elements and his mutated condition which walls him away from humanity. Just an amazing image.

Side rant: Sadly, the Marvel Masterworks that cover the best range of comics from this era- FF 41-60- are poorly done, using inferior representations of these most influential comics from the Silver Age. Luckily, current Marvel trade management is aware of the problem, and we’ve been promised (through the Marvel Masterworks board) a new restoration and presentation of these issues in the future. I suspect we’re going to get FF Omnibus 2 next year when the next FF movie comes out. We know we’re also getting a Frank Miller Daredevil Omnibus reprinting his first run on the Daredevil book, and there will also be a Steve Ditko Spider-Man Omnibus. I love Omnibuses (Omnibusii?); how can anyone not love oversized comics on the choicest paper available?

Per our friends at Newsarama. I thought his run was okay, nothing special. I did like the first story, but the FF’s been stuck in Civil War tie-in mode. My own opinion on the best and worst FF runs are unchanged:
Pantheon: Lee/Kirby, Byrne, Simonson.

Slight step down from Pantheon: Wolfman’s run (seriously, FF 200 is the best Reed/Doom fight), Waid/Ringo, Kesel’s fill-ins.

Toilet paper: Englehart’s run, DeFalco/Ryan (Although I’ve liked DeFalco on other books, here he was just antagonizing readers through annoying gimmicks. Sales stayed surprisingly strong in a shrinking market, but the books are unreadable now.)

Is it too early to start campaigning for Kesel to get the full-time gig? I think not. Karl’s stories always capture the characters perfectly, and his yarns always entertain. Think I’ll stop by fellow U of Delaware alumni Tom Brevoort’s Marvel blog…

Trivia question: Who is the best Spider-Man writer not named Stan Lee?

1. J. Michael Straczynski
2. Paul Jenkins
3. Gerry Conway
4. Howard Mackie

BZZZT! None of the above!

The answer, my friends, is J. M. DeMatteis. And it’s not even close. His run on Spectacular Spider-Man in the 1990s with Sal Buscema was a personal favorite of mine, and his work was so good Marvel trusted him to write the death scenes of two key characters in the Spidey mythos, Harry Osborne and Aunt May.

But this, this is the good stuff.

In his introduction, DeMatteis talked about how this story demanded to be told for years. At first, he thought it would be a good Wonder Man story, or maybe a Batman story. But after years of rejection, he used it here, and cast Kraven as the villain once he realized Kraven was Russian. DeMatteis has a soft spot for Dostoyevsky, you see.

Mike Zeck’s the artist on this book, and wow. DeMatteis writes of his cohort, “I’ve been playing this game long enough to know that writer/artist chemistry can’t be created or forced: it’s either there or it’s not. With Mike, it was there…and then some.” No argument from me- Zeck gets Kraven perfect here. That’s not an easy job- in this story, Kraven emotions run the gamut: wiry, confident, mad, ecstatic, emotional, depressed, mirthful. Zeck gets them all, and he does it through Kraven’s eyes. Take a look:

Young artists, take note. This book doubles as a manual for drawing eyes.

DeMatteis adds a lot of richness and depth here by playing off symmetry; the book’s actual title is “Fearful Symmetry”, and there’s lots of it here. Example- at the beginning of the story, Spidey attends the funeral of a street thug and gives money to his funeral, asking for “a decent box and a piece of ground.” After his first encounter with Kraven, that’s what he gets- for himself. Funerals, spiders, light- all are motifs played extensively in this story, but not for repetition. Each time we see a repeating theme, the stakes are raised, and the tension builds.

There’s an unexpected bonus here: the lettering of Rick Parker, one of the medium’s most underrated artists. Parker’s actually a cartoonist, most noted for his work on the Beavis & Butthead comic, but he was always fantastic on letters. Unfortunately, when the industry moved to digital lettering, there wasn’t a lot of need for hand letterers, and I haven’t seen a Rick Parker credit in a comic for a while. Let us know if you’re alive, Rick!

This edition is the first in Marvel’s new Premiere Classic editions, hardcover reprints of classic stories. The reproduction’s a tiny, tiny bit wonky at times, as you can tell that the trades department at Marvel worked overtime to make this book look as good as it could. I actually had a copy of the previous hardcover reprinting done in 1989, and Marvel should be proud of the work they did. The linework’s much stronger, there’s a great intro by JM, and they reproduce two issues of Zeck’s original pencils.

I only wish they had included Stan Lee’s introduction from the 1989 volume; after all, how often do we get a book with work by the two best Spider-Man writers of all time?

DeMatteis and Lee;
Ah, to be joined in one book.
Still, buy this Last Hunt.

Buy this book at Amazon!